GEORGE: And somehow it got rusted off of the top. And what I need to know is, is that easy enough to pull out myself and replace or is it better to get a masonry person to come in there and do that?

TOM: You know, it’s not that hard to do and mailboxes, fortunately, are fairly standard in size. What you’re going to want to do is open up the front door of the mailbox and probably if you look inside you’re going to see that the mailbox has probably been screwed into the brick or perhaps into some cleats. They may have put some wood cleats inside of that structure – it’s a rather hollow structure – just to secure the mailbox in place.

Now, when you go to replace it, what you might want to think about doing is replacing it with a vinyl mailbox. They come in plastic as well as metal and that’s going to be less likely to corrode because what happens is you get this corrosion between the aluminum mailboxes and the acid that’s in the mortar joints of the brick and that tends to cause it to either deteriorate or, if it’s a steel mailbox, it’ll cause it to rust.

GEORGE: OK. How do I secure it? Just shove it in or do – how do you secure it?

TOM: Well, usually there’s – you have to look at how the old one is secured, but usually you’re going to screw through the inside of the mailbox out into the brick. There’s probably a fastening system that was installed. It could have been a lead shield, it could have been a piece of wood that was inserted in there. There’s some sort of an attachment surface inside that brick.